Weird and wonderful, Carnivale was perhaps a little too weird to survive on web connection TV.

Michael takes a look back at a much-loved show…

There is more than a little of the game of chance in making a TV show.

Youre competing for peoples time and attention with a lot of other shows.

Hundreds of people are employed in making it.

For this reason, most TV shows follow a well-trodden formula.

Cops n Docs, whodunnits.

Then there are those that dare to break the mould.

They take the risk.

Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesnt.

On occasion, a show will do both.

Carnivalewas one such show.

It was a tantalising story arc that hinted at a rich and thrilling epic.

Damn if there isnt a lot of dust.

Were in Steinbeck territory, the great Dust Bowl, among the multitudes struggling westward through the Depression.

We look back on the 1930s with a mixture of pity and fear.

It was a decade pregnant with dread.

Carnivales mood of burgeoning terror is therefore woven into the very fabric of history.

The Dust Bowl itself was of such size and destructive power that it resembled a biblical plague.

When one character experiences a vision of an atomic explosion it seems at odds with the historical setting.

No such explosion would take place for another ten years.

That word, Trinity.

Piling biblical connotations on top of historical allusion and making it work?

This is scarily good writing, and all done in the service of the story.

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Carnivales writers used this backdrop to increase the feeling that something awful is brewing.

Through narration and flashback we are led to expect a spectacular showdown between the forces of light and darkness.

Its a journey we make incrementally, which is again testament to the quality of the writing.

That sense of movement is also invoked by the shows setting.

Many episodes take for their titles the name of the town in which the carnival has pitched itself.

After a circuitous journey, there is simply no further to go.

They were frequently unwelcome, wherever they stopped.

The conflict between the carny folk and settled people provides the show with some of its most challenging scenes.

However, the most sinister sequences of all come from the shows mythos.

It is a rather intense brew.

There are references to tarot, Methodism, Catholicism, Freemasonry, Manicheanism and the occult in general.

Then of course is the folklore of the carnival itself.

This is treated as well as the period detail.

It is also superbly blended into the shows mystical elements.

One prominent example is the Pick a Number scene.

It is carny justice, their own form of order.

I doubt anyone here remembers.

But thats the way its always done.

Hes also the main go-between for the mysterious Management, who comes off as calling the shots.

Nick Stahl plays Hawkins, a lost drifter with a huge destiny.

Hes an unusual (semi) lead, but its an unusual show.

Even his most innocent words carry feelings of menace.

Of all the shows oddities, this ordinary looking man is the one the viewer is fated to remember.

The images are carefully overlaid to make it look as though they are one and the same.

Its a wonderful visual metaphor for the shows themes and setting and a work of art in itself.

The music, the wailing strings and doleful piano cements the feeling of oddness.

Ultimately, the show was perhaps too weird.

Knauf was offered the chance to continue on a much-reduced budget but declined.

However, it is admirable that Knauf decided against compromising his vision.

As he said himself Not one teeny, tiny shred of our time, trouble and work was wasted.Carnivale.

It will continue to live as long as the work is viewed and enjoyed.